Current issues in economics

A2 Economics – using whiteboards to teach externalities

Once again with my A2 class I successfully used whiteboards to get across the concepts of positive and negative externalities. Below are the graphs done by Sarah Cheng. As I have stated before whiteboards are a very useful way of getting across difficult graphs.

The externalities topic at A2 Level Economics involves being able to draw and understand four graphs. A different way of teaching this area of the course was to get students to use A3 size whiteboards so that they could practice drawing these graphs. This proved to be very successful with students for the following reasons:

the novelty of using whiteboards

if they made a mistake this could be easily rubbed out and they could start again

it allowed me to go around the class to correct graphs where necessary